ON THE RECORD

Rick Santorum has a long, colorful history of making bizarre, inflammatory and just plain ridiculous statements about all sorts of important issues. Here is a rundown of some of Rick’s “greatest hits.”

“Pick any other Republican in the country. He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”

“I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country”

“…everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation. And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he [John McCain] doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden.”

“A lesbian woman came up to me and said, ‘why are you denying me my right?’ I said, ‘well, because it’s not a right.’ It’s a privilege that society recognizes because society sees intrinsic value to that relationship over any other relationship.”

“The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. A third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”

- Rick Santorum on how abortion is responsible for Social Security’s problems, 3/29/11

“I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people’.”

“But is there such thing as a sincere liberal Christian, which says that we basically take this document and re-write it ourselves? Is that really Christian? That’s a bigger question for me. And the answer is, no, it’s not. I don’t think there is such a thing. To take what is plainly written and say that I don’t agree with that, therefore, I don’t have to pay attention to it, means you’re not what you say you are. You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian. That’s sort of how I look at it.

“When you go so far afield of that and take what is a salvation story and turn it into a liberation theology story, which is done in the Catholic world as well as in the evangelical world, you have abandoned Christendom, in my opinion. And you don’t have a right to claim it.”

“I don’t think it works. I think it’s harmful to women, I think it’s harmful to our society to have a society that says that sex outside of marriage is something that should be encouraged or tolerated, particularly among the young. I think it has, as we’ve seen, very harmful long-term consequences for society. So birth control to me enables that and I don’t think it’s a healthy thing for our country.”

–Saying that birth control is harmful to women, society and our country. CN8′s “Nitebeat with Barry Nolan”, July 28, 2005. Click here to watch the video.

“The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong.”

“Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more “professionally” gratifying, and certainly more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of their children. Think about that for a moment…Here, we can thank the influence of radical feminism, one of the core philosophies of the village elders.”

–Blaming “radical feminism” for making women want to work outside the home. It Takes a Family, Pg. 95, July 2005.

“But unlike abortion today, in most states even the slaveholder did not have the unlimited right to kill his slave.”

–Comparing a woman’s right to choose to slavery. It Takes a Family, Pg. 241, July 2005.

“In far too many families with young children, both parents are working, when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them really don’t need to, or at least may not need to work as much as they do… And for some parents, the purported need to provide things for their children simply provides a convenient rationalization for pursuing a gratifying career outside the home.”

–Questioning the needs and motives of families in which both parents work. It Takes A Family, Pg. 94, July 2005.

“It’s amazing that so many kids turn out to be fairly normal, considering the weird socialization they get in public schools.”

–On his belief that public schools are weird. It Takes a Family, Pg. 386, July 2005.

“The elementary error of relativism becomes clear when we look at multiculturalism. Sometime in the 1980s, universities began to champion the importance of “diversity” as a central educational value.”

–Saying the goal of diversity is wrong. It Takes a Family, Pg. 406, July 2005.

“I compared it to something that Adolf Hitler didn’t do, as opposed to something he did do. And that’s a big difference. It was an attempt to make a joke. You probably have learned this in your career, I’m still learning that you don’t make jokes using Hitler.”

–Clarifying that, rather than just comparing Democrats to Hitler, he was actually saying that Democrats were doing something that even Hitler wouldn’t have had the audacity to do. And then saying that it was all just a silly joke anyway. “The Don Imus Show”, MSNBC, June 23, 2005.

“I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942, “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.”

–Comparing Senate Democrats to Adolf Hitler during the debate over filibustering judicial nominees, May 19, 2005.

“We have a nice arrangement there. It works out well. Candidly, we just sort of work it out.

“Sometimes, a couple of my kids stay over there [with the niece and her husband]. We get to stay at grandma’s house, and a couple of kids go over and stay with their cousin. To me, that’s a family situation.

“I don’t know what people’s business that is, to be very honest with you. The fact is, I own a home, pay taxes, reside here, go to jury duty. To me, this is much ado about nothing.

“We usually stay at the in-laws. They raised 10 kids there, so they have plenty of room for us. They [niece and her husband] house sit for us; they watch the house.”

–Commenting on questions about his status as a Pennsylvania Resident. Santorum’s Penn Hills house gets occupancy permit, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 24, 2004

“Why do I owe them money for a bill they approved that was lawful? I don’t owe them anything,”

–On why he doesn’t plan to reimburse the Penn Hills School District the $100,000 it spent on his children’s tuition while they were living in Virginia.

“In this case, what we’re talking about, basically, is priests who were having sexual relations with post-pubescent men. We’re not talking about priests with 3-year-olds, or 5-year-olds. We’re talking about a basic homosexual relationship. Which, again, according to the world view sense is a perfectly fine relationship as long as it’s consensual between people. If you view the world that way, and you say that’s fine, you would assume that you would see more of it.”

“And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more you — this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family.”

–On his belief that there is no right to privacy in the U.S. Constitution. In the Griswold case, the U.S. Supreme Court found that married couples had the right to use birth control.

“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”

“It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning “private” moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”